"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

that baggage will subtly influence the direction of your story, and perhaps its
outcome. And that influence won't necessarily be a benefit to your story. In the same
way, maybe your heart has been broken twice by redheads, or the gorgeous surfer you
dated briefly stole your credit card, did drugs in the back seat of your car and got your
twin sister pregnant before dumping you and vanishing from your life forever. So you
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 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 36

might be carrying a grudge against redheads or good-looking men, and you might
have a tendency to make every redhead in your books a bitch, or every hunk a creep
in disguise.

Second, if you have a name and a physical description right away тАУ Jane Meslie, 37,
blonde with bright blue eyes and great legs and a habit of flipping her hair out of her
face when she's frustrated тАУ you're going to be tempted to look no deeper that her
appearance. When she gets into trouble, you're going to fall back on that hair-flipping
thing, and she's going to do it so often she'll be bald by the end of the book.

Do start developing your character by giving him a problem, a dramatic
need, a compulsion.
Even if you don't have the foggiest idea what your story is going to be about yet, you
don't know where it's going to take place, and you haven't found anything compelling
that you'd like to say to an audience of more than one, you can do this. Say тАЬMy main
character wants _____ more than anything else in the world.тАЭ

What does the character want? Love, respect, courage, revenge, a kidney for his kid
sister, to find the son she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen? Throw
something down on the paper. It won't be written in stone and you can always go
back later and change it. Or you can, when you create the character, bank him for a
later book if he doesn't fit your needs once you get rolling. In writing as in life,
nothing you do is ever wasted. So go ahead and jump in. Your character wants
something. If he's like most people, he wants several somethings, and about the time
you allow yourself to start discovering them, you'll begin to find out where your story
is going, and what it will be about.
He also wants to avoid something тАУ and these things the character wants to avoid can
be more compelling by far that the things he hopes to gain. What scares him to death?
Humiliation, disfigurement, pain, terminal illness, poverty? What will he do anything
to avoid? What has he already done to avoid his greatest fears? Give him something
that will wake him up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, hands clutching his
covers, body rigid with terror. If you want to really make your character come to life,
choose something that terrifies you тАУ you'll find that when you write something that
makes you shake, you'll make your reader shake, too.
A rule of good storytelling is that the protagonist will confront the thing he fears the
most and overcome it in order to win the thing he desires the most. This isn't a hard-
and-fast rule, and for every book where the writer followed it, you'll find at least one
where the writer ignored it completely. But overall, the most satisfying stories will at
least approach this rule.

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